Chit Chat

Photo albums

Last night my friend and I were talking about how fun it is to go through old family photo albums and how it's sad that new photo albums (in the print version) don't really happen anymore. I may have had a few photos printed in the last few years just to frame, but I haven't actually created a real photo album in years.

I can probably speak for many that nowadays photos remain either on your phone or transferred over to your computer where they remain unseen by anyone. I love that my grandparents and parents used to photograph moments from their lives and store those memories in an album. Going through those photos is always an awesome experience, and a big part of me wants to start creating real photo albums -- not electronic folders of photos that will just die on my computer someday.

Does anyone here print out their photos and create albums? Any tips for starting from scratch?
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Re: Photo albums

  • twojunebridestwojunebrides member
    25 Love Its 10 Comments First Anniversary Name Dropper
    edited May 2015
    I use shutterfly to make albums--- it is super easy and they have great coupons all the time.  I get the books printed and mailed to me!

    **edited for spelling** I can't think today.
  • I scrapbook, so all my pictures from big events are preserved that way. 

    My S and BIL use a service that compiles your Facebook posts/albums into a printed book, so they do one of those every year. You can select which useless ones to skip, but they get a really nice "yearbook" out of it at the end that the kids love to look at.

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  • kvrunskvruns member
    Tenth Anniversary 5000 Comments 500 Love Its First Answer
    my mom does an annul mixbook or shutterfly book for th year.  So digital prints for the year, I think it accomplishes the photo album thing well
  • I love scrapbooking. I like to have my scrapbooks tell a story so a lot of times I will set up the pictures in an order than can convey what happened.
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  • Perhaps once a year I put my favorite photos from the year into a Snapfish photo album. I love them. I really like the ones that let you put an actual photo as the entire cover, so I can display it like I would a framed photo anyway. 

    Also, my mom transferred all her old film photos from albums to thumb drives and gave them to my sister and me one Christmas. I LOVED it. Granted I'm deathly afraid of losing said thumb drive, but I know I have it should I ever want to revisit my family memories of birth through high school. 
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  • My MIL puts together photo albums every year, and has been doing it since before she had her kids. It's amazing to go through all of her old photos and now the new ones - she just put together one from our wedding with all of the pro photos (allll of them) and even some of the candid ones that were on FB. She has so many that the hutch she kept them on got too heavy and they had to be moved to other rooms to keep from falling through the floor! She does just the traditional, old school photo albums and print the pictures using Shutterfly.

  • I scrapbook so I tend to get a lot of the pictures I take printed. I also gift a lot of Shutterfly albums to people (thank goodness my supermarket gives out free 8x8 album coupons all the time).
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  • Awesome ideas, thank you! Now I want to take up scrapbooking ;)
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  • peachy13 said:

    Awesome ideas, thank you! Now I want to take up scrapbooking ;)


    I love it. It is so relaxing. It can get expensive sometimes, so whenever my craft store is having a sale I stock up!
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  • I agree with this 100%, everything just gets stuck on a phone or computer! I scrapbook a good amount but for all big trips I do a photo book that I order online. Generally you can find a groupon for very reasonable, I have used shutterfly, piccabo, and any others they have on there. After every trip I sit down and go through the photos and make a new book for them, I have even had extras sent to me and given them to family that went on the trip with us, everyone loves them. They also make great coffee table books and people love to flip through them when they come over. 

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  • anjemonanjemon member
    500 Love Its 500 Comments Third Anniversary Name Dropper
    I agree, it's awesome to have actual photo albums people can look through.

    I bought some of the Simple Stories photo albums. I don't do much of the scrapbook style stuff they intend, but they let you put in pages with different pictures sizes and orientation. Then I print out the pictures I really like from the  year and put them in the album. I intend to make them fancier, but I haven't really gotten to all of that.

    I also like to do Shutterfly albums for all my big events. If there are a lot of pictures it's more fun to have a big fancy book album. And I've been going back and doing some books from some of the big trips I did in college.
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  • I scrapbook.  I have Year Books from 2004-2013.  The 2013 book was a digital scrapbook I made through shutterfly.  I've been selecting the photos I want to include in my 2014 book so I can get working on them.  I have scrapbooks starting from my birth through 1989 at my mom's place.  In 1989 mom decided we were old enough to do our own photo books so she stopped, and we didn't do anything, so there are just boxes of pictures from 1989 through 2003 that I need to work on.  I'll do all those pictures as oldschool scrapbooks, and will do the digital ones for everything going forward.  I've even gone as far as to scan postcards or birthday cards I've received, ticket stubs, Christmas photo cards, and wedding invitations to include in my shutterfly digital books.

    The last two times we've had a kid over (10 year old friend's daughter and 7 year old niece), they've both found the photo albums and looked through a couple.  Fascinating.
  • edited May 2015

    We made Shutterfly albums for our wedding and honeymoon.

    But, we had so many awesome photos from our wedding & honeymoon that we didn't want them just sitting in a box or computer drive, never to be seen.  So, we bought a tv (found a great Black Friday deal on a Samsung 42" smart tv) and hooked it up to our computer, basically setting it up as a monitor, and using photo slideshow as the screensaver.  The TV has a timer function so it will automatically turn on and off from 5:30am-7:30am and 5pm-9pm on weekdays and 8am-9pm on weekends (all the times we are typically home) and it randomly rotates through all our photos as a digital photo frame. We have all our wedding photos, engagement photos, photos from when we were dating, vacation photos, photos of our families, random landscape photos, photos of us as kids, and whatever other photos we want to look at regularly. Anytime we have good photos, we load them onto that computer to be included in the photo frame. We absolutely love it and all our photos actually get looked at regularly.

     

    Edit: DH also built a frame to go around the tv, so it actually looks like a very large photo frame and not a tv. 

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  • Ditto PP.  I use Shutterfly for vacation albums, our wedding album and I'm working on an album documenting our  first year of marriage.  
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  • anjemonanjemon member
    500 Love Its 500 Comments Third Anniversary Name Dropper
    adk19 said:

    I scrapbook.  I have Year Books from 2004-2013.  The 2013 book was a digital scrapbook I made through shutterfly.  I've been selecting the photos I want to include in my 2014 book so I can get working on them.  I have scrapbooks starting from my birth through 1989 at my mom's place.  In 1989 mom decided we were old enough to do our own photo books so she stopped, and we didn't do anything, so there are just boxes of pictures from 1989 through 2003 that I need to work on.  I'll do all those pictures as oldschool scrapbooks, and will do the digital ones for everything going forward.  I've even gone as far as to scan postcards or birthday cards I've received, ticket stubs, Christmas photo cards, and wedding invitations to include in my shutterfly digital books.


    The last two times we've had a kid over (10 year old friend's daughter and 7 year old niece), they've both found the photo albums and looked through a couple.  Fascinating.
    I actually really love the idea of scanning some stuff like programs and tickets. That's the sort of thing I love to keep, but doesn't really fit with the way I scrapbook. Genius!
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  • So weird, I just had a work lunch that my team and I do once a month and we randomly start talking about wedding photos and videos and my boss brought up that if there are photo albums sitting around the house, people will actually look at them. 
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  • I used to make scrap books but it's so expensive. And we have a tiny place so I can't spread out well and I'd have to clean up every night, not just when a project is done, so I don't do it much any more.

    We're getting a printed album for our wedding.

    That said, I find I share more photos now than ever before because they are on my phone. we haven't had one visitor yet to our house because there's only room for 2 chairs, so unless I lug the photo album somewhere, no one sees the photos.

    I love just being able to whip out my phone.
  • falsarafalsara member
    1000 Comments 500 Love Its Third Anniversary First Answer
    We don't take that many pictures right now, so there's really no point in us making albums, I'm sure in the future we will.

    My mom is a scrapbooker and when I turned 18 she did a huge scrap book documenting every year from birth till after graduation.  It's great, i still go through and look at it sometimes. 

    I'm already planning on doing a scrapbook for the wedding pictures, with my mom's help. 

                                               

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  • I don't make albums all that often anymore but I print pictures that I love so I at least have copies of the ones I know I want to have and would be devastated if they were lost on a computer or phone.  Growing up I have albums for my dance days, high school, college, sorority and now of course the wedding, but other than that I have my favorite printed pictures that I either have organized or in one of the basic albums that I can slip a picture into.  When I turned 30 I made an album with all of my favorite memories and past times of my first 30 years and when I "retired" from the cheer company I had worked 12 years for I made a scrapbook/album of all the events I did.  Besides the wedding I have not done anything recent but one of these days I might get to get super organized and make some more digital albums but I at least have the pics that mean the most to me in print form. 
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  • I use Shutterfly for our big vacations, and also did a re-make of our wedding album, cos we didn't want to pay for all of the extra pages.  DH takes about 1000 photos for each week we're on vacation, so we'd never look at them all again.  I can fit close to 600 in a full sized Shutterfly book, and with them on the shelf, we look back at them more often

  • If you think about it, back in the day they didn't have as much access to photography. That way photos were rare and were treasured!!! My parents wedding album has 5 pictures in it. What will mine have? Probably like 800.

    When  you have that much access and quality, it starts to lose novelty!!!

    I like albums, though. I use shutterfly, but I always browse the scrapbooking section at michaels and want to play around. 
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  • @larrygaga you should come scrapbook with me. Some friends and I go up to one of the scrapbook stores, where they have a big crop room with long tables, lots of lights, and they bring in dinner. So we can spread out and not mess up our own houses, share supplies, and if we need a certain paper or glue or anything just go buy it (they'll run a tab all night, and last I checked you get a discount off anything you buy during the crop). Plus then we all get to show off our work. :)

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  • I always make a scrapbook anytime I go on a big international trip. I have one from my year in Spain, another for my semester in Italy, a third from a trip to Costa Rica with my mom, etc. I include not only picture but other little mementos to remind me of particular things - ticket stubs, maps, etc.

    I do wish I did more of this with my regular life, but I don't really take pictures that often. I don't own/want a smartphone, and DH hates pictures so he rarely takes them. I do bring my digital camera with me to important events, but I wish I documented more of our daily lives than I do.
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  • God. Now I'm going to make another photo album of Fi and I.
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  • @larrygaga you should come scrapbook with me. Some friends and I go up to one of the scrapbook stores, where they have a big crop room with long tables, lots of lights, and they bring in dinner. So we can spread out and not mess up our own houses, share supplies, and if we need a certain paper or glue or anything just go buy it (they'll run a tab all night, and last I checked you get a discount off anything you buy during the crop). Plus then we all get to show off our work. :)

    Oh my god that sounds amazing
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  • larrygaga said:

    @larrygaga you should come scrapbook with me. Some friends and I go up to one of the scrapbook stores, where they have a big crop room with long tables, lots of lights, and they bring in dinner. So we can spread out and not mess up our own houses, share supplies, and if we need a certain paper or glue or anything just go buy it (they'll run a tab all night, and last I checked you get a discount off anything you buy during the crop). Plus then we all get to show off our work. :)

    Oh my god that sounds amazing
    Me too, me too!
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